Meta

Creative Food

Hedwig is one of my favourite Harry Potter characters – she is clever, loyal and beautiful! I especially love the musical theme she was given in the films. Imagine listening to this lovely sountrack while decorating your Hedwig cookies…pure bliss!

Where I live, we currently experience the change from winter to spring. The buzzards have begun flying over the hills again and the first spring flowers have returned. This has inspired me to show you this recipe now. Remember the wonderful scene in the first Harry Potter film, in which Harry release Hedwig and when she returns to the castle, spring has come. I love this scene! Here you can watch it again!

Admittedly, Hedwig is a snowy owl and my owls have brown wings. However, even snowy owls are not completely white, especially in summer. 😉 If you want to make your Hedwigs even more “snowy”, you can, of course, leave away the cocoa powder and dust the wings with powdered sugar after baking, instead.Finally, we have to talk about the taste of these cookies. It is sadly often the case that super cutely decorated sweets are not quite as tasty as they look, for instance, because incredible amounts of sugary ingredients are used to make them beautiful. This is definitely not the case with these owls. As you will see below, the owls are decorated only with chocolate, cocoa powder and almonds – and all these bits add to the owl cookies’ fabulous taste!

The cookies are buttery, crisp and the smell and taste wonderfully of almonds…oohhhhh! Sooo good! What a pity I don’t have any left! 😉Show me your Hedwigs! I would be thrilled to receive a picture of your owl cookies on Instagram (@bettythebakingprincess)!

Combine flour and salt; sieve the mixture over the butter mixture and stir to combine.

Refrigerate for at least ½ an hour.

Line one or two baking sheets with baking parchment.

Dust your surface with flour. Roll the dough until it is 7mm thick and cut out round shapes. Basically, you can make your owls as big or small as you wish. I chose a diameter of about 8cm.

Now the best part begins: It’s time to create your owls! Use reserved cookie dough to form the white parts of the eyes and chocolate chips for the brown parts. Make the beak with a whole almond, the talons with almond slivers. Use a round cookie cutter (preferably one with a larger diameter than the one you use for the owl body) to create the wings but don’t cut through the dough entirely! To create the impression of feathers, use a knife or a fork. Dust the wings with cocoa powder using a small brush.

Cool the cookies for at least 30 min, preferably longer (up to 1h), to help them keep their form when baking. Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Bake the cookies for 15-20 min, take them out of the oven and let them cool down.

Only a day to go until Valentine’s Day – and even though I never actually “celebrate” this day myself, I still enjoy creating a Valentine’s Day recipe each year. Last year I made cute Owl Cupcakes and the year before, I invented a heart-shaped version of a mini Victoria Sponge.

This year, I have the ultimate Valentine’s Day treat for you: it’s sweet, it’s pink aaaand it’s a macarons!

I chose pomegranate as the fruity ingredient – I just loooove the look of the pomegranate seeds (and their taste as well, of course). The rest of the ganache is mainly white chocolate to make sure I could have the pinkest macarons ever.

To add an extra bit of glamour to my little beauties, I sprinkled them with a bit of gold glitter or painted little golden hearts on top of the macarons halves. The glitter was given to me by a dear friend for Christmas and I was so happy that I could finally try it out.

I suggest that you serve pomegranate seeds along with the macarons. Firstly, because their sweetness can definitely do with a fruity counterpart and secondly, because, I must admit that the flavour of the pomegranate in the ganache is quite subtle. 😉

Have a lovely Valentine’s Day and don’t hesitate to bake these little treats – macarons are honestly not as difficult to make as some people want to make you believe! To insure you get the perfect heart shapes, you can use this Heart Template.

For the preparation of the ganache: Bring cream to the boil and pour over white chocolate until the chocolate has melted. Add the food colouring. Let it cool in the fridge for at least 2h.

For the macaron halves: Mix almond flour and powdered sugar. Whisk the egg whites until almost stiff, then, add the sugar while whisking. As soon as the mixture forms little peaks, add the food colouring.Add the almond flour-powdered sugar mixture in three steps. Fold it carefully into the egg whites-mixture.

Put the mixture into a piping bag with a round nozzle and pipe the hearts according to the template onto the baking parchment.

Let the hearts rest for at least 30-45 minutes (make there’s no draught!). Preheat the oven to 130°C.

Bake the macarons for about 17 minutes. Afterwards, take them together with the baking parchment off the baking tin. Detach them carefully from the baking parchment when they are quite cool.

As soon as the macarons are completely cool, fill them with the ganache and put the halves together. Decorate with the old glitter.

Store in the fridge for up to 48 hours. Serve with pomegranate seeds. Enjoy!

Tip: You can easily prepare the macaron halves on the day before.

_________________________________

To get a printed version:
Download the pdf. (Both English and German versions available!)

Happy Easter to you all! I hope you are spending these days with your lovely families and/or friends and a lot of good food. I definitely am! Furthermore, I am really enjoying the way my organic garden starts coming to life again…it’s sooo beautiful!

So here comes my Easter post – this year I suggest some really cute Sugar Cookies Bunnies decorated with royal icing.

The way I decorated the cookies is simple: First, I drew a white outline, then I flooded the cookies and at the end I added the pink tail and ears. When the icing had completely dried, I drew the eyes and whiskers with an edible ink pen I got as a gift from lovely Kathrin from Kathrin’s Cup of Tea.

You can find all instructions on how to bake the Sugar Cookies and how to work with Royal Icing right here.

It’s exactly two weeks until Valentine’s day – and here’s my suggestion for the Valentine’s Day’s Dessert: Owl Cupcakes with Lime and Persimmon!When I think of Valentine’s Day, I have to think of Gilderoy Lockhart’s Valentine’s Day “surprise” which annoyed probably every single creature living at Hogwarts.

‘Happy Valentine’s Day!’ Lockhart shouted. ‘And may I thank the forty-six people who have so far sent me cards! Yes, I have taken the liberty of arranging this little surprise for you all – and it doesn’t end here!’

Lockhart clapped his hands and through the doors to the Entrance Hall marched a dozen surly-looking dwarfs. Not just any dwarfs, however. Lockhart had them all wearing golden wings and carrying harps.

‘My friendly, card-carying cupids!’ beamed Lockhart.

– Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, p. 176.

Lockhart hired dwarfs to deliver the Valentines – I suggest some perfectly cute little owls instead. With a lovely messangers such as the owl on my cupcakes even Ginny’s embarrassing poem for Harry (“His eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad…”) might have been more successful – who knows? 😉Of course, these cupcakes are not just about the fondant owls. I simply love the lime and persimmon combination! The fruity and moist texture makes you long for spring and summer, it’s so refreshing.I hope you like this recipe – don’t hesitate to show me your results either here or on Instagram using the hashtag #bettythebakingprincess.
I am looking forward to it!

All the best,
Bettina.

_________________________________

Valentine’s Day Owl Cupcakes with Lime and Persimmon

yield: about 8 cupcakes

preparation time: 50 min

baking time: 18-20 min

Ingredients:

for the muffins:

­ 2 eggs (at room temperature)

­ 75g butter, softened

­ 1 small pinch of salt

­ 90g muscovado sugar

­ 40g white sugar

­ 80g Greek yoghurt

­ 125g flour

­ 1 tsp. baking powder

­ juice and zest of ½ lime

­ 75g persimmon (finely chopped)

for the decoration:

­ white, green, red and black fondant

­ a bit of jam

­ sugar hearts

­ toothpicks

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 160°C. Prepare a muffin tin with 8 paper liners.

Lightly beat the eggs. Add the sugar, then the warm butter and salt. Mix until light and fluffy.

Add the yoghurt, then sift the flour and baking powder on top.

Add lime (juice and zest) and persimmon.

Divide the mixture evenly between the cake cases. Bake for 18-20 minutes until risen and firm to touch.

Let the muffins cool down completely. In the meantime, prepare the fondant owl.

Cut an owl shape using the white (or green) fondant, then another half one in the other colour. “Glue” it on top of the first owl using a bit of jam. Decorate with eyes, eyebrows, sugar hearts as mouths, buttons, feet and more. Be creative!

Put a bit of jam on the lower side of the owl and put it onto the cupcake. Decorate with fondant heart in on a toothpick and give it to someone you love! ❤

(muffin recipe inspired by a recipe from “Cupcakes” by Marianne Hudson)

_________________________________

To get a printed version:
Download the pdf. (Both English and German versions available!)

Welcome back to a new Betty-The-Baking-Princess recipe! Today I will show you a simple Gingerbread recipe with honey. The cookie dough is quickly made but it has to rest in the fridgefor at least 12 hours. Therefore, these are no last-minute cookies – they need a good Christmassy night’s sleep. 😉

Once the dough has had enough resting, you can use various cookie cutters to make the cookies. You bake them – and as soon as they have cooled down completely, you can decorate them!That’s the part I liked best! You can be creative, feel super Christmassy and design whatever you like. You can follow my instructions on how to work with Royal Icing here or on the pdf below.Already now I wish you all a very MERRY CHRISTMAS and who knows, maybe another Christmas Cookie recipe will follow…

Much love,
Bettina.

_________________________________

To get a printed version:
Download the pdf. (Both English and German versions available!)

Saying goodbye to dear friends is never easy – but at least Kathrin (from Kathrin’s Cup of Tea) and I had a wonderful baking time before it came to that. A bit more than a week ago, she left Switzerland for a a semester at the University of Manchester…and we had absolutely wanted to bake together before she left!

So, together, we made these adorable (if not necessarily perfect) Harry Potter Cookies and Orange-Chocolate-Macarons, which we will show you in the next post.

You can find the recipe for the sugar cookies and Royal Icing here. As a little twist (and to match our lovely macarons) we added a bit of orange zest and juice (only a few drops) to the dough and also to the icing.

The decoration of the cookies is pretty straight-forward. As we could not find all the cookie cutters we would have liked, we drew some of the shapes ourselves. We then simply laid them on the rolled dough and cut the shapes with a knife.

We collected our “extra-shapes” and made a nice little printable for you: